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The best of the best, the fastest, and the strongest… Today I’ll give you the diet of the Earth’s top athletes.
The fastest on land
We aren’t talking Usain Bolt here. When he ran the 100m in 9.69 seconds, he only averaged 23 miles per hour. Pssh, what a slug. The cheetah averages over 70 miles an hour for sprint speeds! That’s almost three times as fast!
Diet: All meat baby! Cheetahs usually eat small animals like rabbits or birds, but prefer dining on antelope.
The fastest in the water
Phelps pulled off eight gold medals and is considered the fastest swimmer alive. How does he compare to a fish? Well, with Phelps finishing the 100m freestyle in 47.51 seconds, you’d think no sushi could beat him. That works out to be roughly 4.7 miles per hour, or a brisk, walking pace. On the other hand, the fastest fish in the world is the barracuda, which can swim over 60 miles per hour! So don’t bother outswimming a barracuda, you’re just going to be lunch. (Note: Barracudas will rarely bite humans, but better watch your toes just to be on the safe side!)
Diet: It’s nothing close to Phelp’s daily meals. Barracudas stick mostly to smaller fish, like anchovies.
The stongest on land overall
This would have to go to the largest land animal, the African Bush Elephant, which can lift 1000 pounds just using their trunk. Try doing a bicep curl with that weight! They’re also known to carry 5 tons.
Diet: The African Bush Elephant is a vegetarian power lifter. Elephants will consume about 5% of their weight everyday including 30-50 gallons of water. But to put this in perspective, I would have to munch down eleven pounds worth of fruits and vegetables before bedtime, in order to match this.
The strongest relative to their body weight
Now you’re beginning to see that humans are certainly not the fastest. How about the strongest? Well, until 2007, it was thought to be the rhinoceros beetle, which was found in one study to lift 30 times its body weight while walking. This is equivalent to a human lifting a pick-up truck overhead and walking a mile without tiring.
Then two researchers, Michael Heethoff and Lars Koerner, measured the strength of a tropical mite, Archegozetes longisetosus, finding it had a pull force equal to 1150 times its own weight, five times more than expected for an organism of its size (1 mm, 100 µg). To put this in human terms, this would be like a person lifting an 86 ton tank, or an elephant with a tower of 1150 elephants on its back. Now I may be able to pull this off in a bench press, but only if the right blonde was watching me.
Diet: Mites really have a varied diet ranging from the body fluids of their hosts to plant juices or some types of fungus. Just no tofu. You certainly can’t bench a tank on a tofu diet.
Hopefully, this can help you put things in perspective. Our fastest and strongest doesn’t even come close to some of our animal neighbors.
Your Digital Trainer,
Jeremiah
Images by tambako, michaelhaas75, mae.noelle, and jh_fn.
Comments: Do you know of any other animal athletes?
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Nice post… Like the tie between athletes and the animal kingdom. Keep it up!
Mike